The recent images of John Daly golfing without a shirt were unpleasant, perhaps even disgusting. But rather than make me retch they mostly make me sad. The two most physically talented golfers of all time are Tiger Woods and shirtless John and their respective professional careers and personal lives reveal the difference between mental strength and weakness, between self-confidence and self-loathing, between achievement and regret.

At the same time it's hard not to like John Daly and unless you're perfect it's hard not to find comfort in the fat cloaking his torso and the cigarette dangling from his mouth. If Tiger is the one to admire for his never-ending discipline and vigilance, the one whose example we aspire to attain, then Daly is the one to cushion our failures. It is shirtless John's image we turn to when in mid-February we realize we haven't been to the gym in a week and our finances are no better than when we resolved to organize them on New Year's day.

But at the same time again, I wonder where is Daly's personal pride. It's as if he tried and failed so many times he's given up. Not unlike Cannery Row's Mack who said "everything I done went sour and now I just clown for the boys, just try to make the boys laugh." Daly, however, should be so much more than the clown he has become. He has achieved and succeeded and attained so much more than most of us yet it seems somehow he has forgotten the good days and can recall only the bad.

Then again (can you sense my ambivalence) Daly might defend himself with the words of William Hazlitt, who said "man is the only animal that laughs and weeps for man is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what things might have been." Perhaps playing the fool - the big fat clown - is the only way Daly can keep from crying.